Castles and Coprolites

How do I assess thee? Let me count the ways. I measure thy depth and breadth and height, The microscope can reach, those aspects out of sight Using bright-field and contrast of phase. I measure to the level of my instrumental ways, And analytical precision, by plain and cross polarised light. I count thy inclusions, assessed by eye outright, I count thy voids, where organics have decayed, I measure thy referred and related distribution, Thy particle sorting, if wind or water laid. I measure all facets of your constitution, Each of the many layers that amassed. Revealed, through careful attribution The hidden secrets of the past.

My precious How did it get to be May already? That's 4 months in my new position at Edinburgh! It turns out that having complete responsibility for your own work schedule is liberating but also a challenge. So many tasks, so little time. Starting out on an academic career, I didn't realise how much of my time some of these tasks would take. Even in a research focused position, a great deal of my time over the past 4 months has been spent on administrative duties, including paperwork for teaching a new course next year, coursework and exam marking and moderation, multiple funding applications, and the edited volume of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences which is slowly taking over my life as the publication date approaches. Not all of these tasks are arduous - there is a strange part of me that gets satisfaction from writing a well constructed argument in a grant proposal (even better when the proposal is successful). Even editorial work is not too bad - the actual ...

Melted silica in ashy deposits at Neolithic Boncuklu (Turkey) above, and Kamiltepe (Azerbaijan) below. Silica is one of the most common components of plant ash, and is often seen in the form of phytoliths. In the case studies I have worked on, phytoliths in ash can have >50% abundance in thin section, and there may be millions of them per gram of sediment. Less common are these features, also composed of silica but with a very different appearance. These are 'bubbles' of melted silica, and they occur when silica is present in conjunction with alkali salts. Heating under these conditions causes the silica to melt and form what has been termed a 'glassy slag' or vesicular glass (e.g. see Canti 2003). The word vesicular refers to the gas bubbles you can see within the larger silica mass (also bubble shaped!). I prefer to call it melted silica rather than use the word 'glass' as it can be confusing in an archaeological context. The two examples here are from...